Privacy

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Privacy has become one of the defining issue of the Information Age. CIS has received national recognition for its interdisciplinary and multi-angle examination of privacy, particularly as it relates to emerging technology.

Albert Gidari is the Consulting Director of Privacy at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society. He was a partner for over 20 years at Perkins Coie LLP, achieving a top-ranking in privacy law by Chambers, before retiring to consult with CIS on its privacy program. He negotiated the first-ever "privacy by design" consent decree with the Federal Trade Commission on behalf of Google, which required the establishment of a comprehensive privacy program including third party compliance audits. Mr.

Dr. Jennifer King is the Director of Privacy at CIS. An information scientist by training, Dr. King is a recognized expert and scholar in information privacy. She examines the public’s understanding and expectations of online privacy and the policy implications of emerging technologies. Her research sits at the intersection of human-computer interaction, law, and the social sciences, focusing on social media, genetic privacy, mobile platforms, the Internet of Things (IoT), and digital surveillance.

Norberto Andrade is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow scholar at UC Berkeley School of Law, Berkeley Center for Law & Technology (BCLT), and a Fellow at the Hague Institute for the Internationalisation of Law (HiiL, The Netherlands). He has worked as a Scientific Officer at the Institute for Prospective Technological Studies (IPTS) of the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre, and as a legal expert in the field of telecommunications at the Portuguese Regulatory Authority for Communications (ANACOM).

Charles Belle is the founder and Executive Director of Startup Policy Lab, a new nonprofit think tank dedicated to connecting policymakers and the startup community. Examining public policy at the nexus of startups and technology, Charles' research is currently focused on privacy and how to support local government open data initiatives while simultaneously protecting citizen privacy.

Stanford Law School today announced the appointment of Dr. Jennifer King as Director of Consumer Privacy at the Center for Internet and Society (CIS). Dr. King will lead the center’s research efforts in consumer privacy. Dr. King joins Albert Gidari, Consulting Director of Privacy, who focuses on government surveillance and enforcement, cross border data issues, and electronic surveillance.

Canada's Office of the Privacy Commissioner has concluded that an existing law, the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA), gives individuals legal power to make individual websites take down information. This goes well beyond the rights recognized by the European Court of Justice in its “right to be forgotten” case, and raises the following important questions

In data privacy, as in so many other matters, past is prologue. Fifty years ago, there were calls for a “National Data Center” amassing all personal data collected by federal agencies. Supporters claimed it would lead to more efficiency and better research.

End-to-end encryption is a powerful tool for security and safety. It lets patients talk to their doctors in complete confidence. It helps journalists communicate with sources without governments listening in. It gives citizens in repressive regimes a lifeline to human rights advocates. And by end-to-end encrypting sensitive information, a cyber attack aimed at revealing private conversations would be far less likely to succeed.

Arguing that a defendant’s conviction for website hacking should be overturned because legitimate, highly valuable security and privacy research commonly employs techniques that are essentially identical to what the defendant did and that such independent research is of great value to academics, government regulators and the public even when – often especially when — conducted without a website owner’s permission.

Arguing that the information publicly available on the NSA's Upstream program, combined with an understanding of how the Internet works, means plaintiff Wikimedia has met its burden of proving standing to challenge Upstream.

Arguing that if the court should not compel Apple to create software to enable unlocking and search of the San Bernardino shooter’s iPhone, it will jeopardize digital and personal security more generally.

"Danielle Citron, a professor of law at the University of Maryland who has written on privacy issues, is also skeptical of the database, saying “there’s no community more under surveillance than the poor.”

"Whether people decide to keep PGP or make the switch, the flaw shows how difficult it is to perfect the art of sending secure messages, said Riana Pfefferkorn, a cryptography fellow at Stanford University.

“Even after withstanding years' worth of widespread scrutiny by security experts, a flaw in an encryption standard may still turn up,” she told me. “Plus, even if the vulnerability is fixed by the maintainers, users' configuration of their email client may not be perfect, potentially leaving them unwittingly exposed.”"

"As long as they are following their own privacy policies, carriers “are largely free to do what they want with the information they obtain, including location information, as long as it’s unrelated to a phone call,” said Albert Gidari, the consulting director of privacy at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society and a former technology and telecommunications lawyer. Even when the phone is not making a call, the system receives location data, accurate within a few hundred feet, by communicating with the device and asking it which cellphone towers it is near."

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When you give sites and services information about yourself, where does it go? Who else will get hold of it, and what will they use it for? The recent revelations about Cambridge Analytica's acquisition of data about tens of millions of Facebook users without their knowledge or consent have prompted renewed interest in how data about us gets shared, sold, used, and misused -- well beyond what we ever expected. Join us for a SLATA/CIS lunchtime conversation with three experts from Stanford’s Center for Internet and Society as we discuss the legal and policy implications of the Cambridge Analytica scandal and responses from Congress and courts. How can we prevent this from happening again? What new problems might we create through poorly-crafted legal responses?

CIS Cryptography Fellow Riana Pfefferkorn will be speaking on a panel on "Cryptography and Ethics"at the 2018 Cybersecurity Law Symposium. Leading experts from academia and industry will discuss the legal and policy issues that arise from the latest developments in cybersecurity. This event is open to the public, but registration is required.

Cryptography Fellow Riana Pfefferkorn will be speaking at the 2018 InfoSec Southwest.

Encryption shields private information from malicious eavesdroppers. After years of slow adoption, encryption is finally becoming widespread in consumer-oriented electronic devices and communications services. Consumer-oriented encryption software is now more user-friendly, and much of it turns on encryption by default. These advances enhance privacy and security for millions of people.

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"FBI Director James Comey has said that voter-registration sites in at least a dozen states — including Arizona — were targeted by hackers.

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson has broached the idea of increasing the protection for the nation’s voting systems. They could potentially be put under the umbrella of critical infrastructure, which currently includes the electrical grid and the banking system, among other things.

Jennifer Granick talks about how notions of privacy have changed over the years and where she thinks things are headed in the future. She is a professor at the Stanford School of Law and Director of Civil Liberties at the Center for Internet and Society, where she specializes in the intersection of engineering, privacy and the law.

Last week Yahoo announced that 500 million accounts had been hacked – consumer names, email addresses, phone messages, passwords and birth dates were stolen. It is one of the biggest security breaches in history. We’re been seeing a lot more cyber attacks on companies, individuals and the government in recent years. So who is behind them and what can consumers do to protect ourselves online?